Anorak

Celebrities Category

Celebrity news & gossip from the world’s showbiz and glamour magazines (OK!, Hello, National Enquirer and more). We read them so you don’t have to, picking the best bits from the showbiz world’s maw and spitting it back at them. Expect lots of sarcasm.

HEADY days for Slade fans, for whom the band only ever seems to ride high on the popular culture news Chopper when it’s Christmas. Beyonce Knowles has successfully bid for Dave Hill’s hair, and, moreover, taken to wearing it over her own luxurious chestnut locks.

In 1895, Oscar Wilde was sent down for two years for the crime of homosexuality.Male homosexuality was decriminalised in Northern Ireland with the passing of law reform in the House of Commons in…1982!

PEOPLE often wheel out the line about footballers being overpaid. Some of them are indeed, paid gigantic sums of money. Many will tell you that it is too much ‘to kick a ball around for 90 minutes’, but of course, those people are gasping simpletons.

Of course, there’s a lot more to being a footballer than turning up on a Saturday afternoon and running around for one-and-a-half hours. Either way, there’s no getting away from the fact that football has made some young men millionaires.

JOHN Grisham has rather surprised the usual people by telling the truth about child pornography. Yes, there is truly vile stuff out there and those who produce it and seek it should indeed be locked up. But that’s not quite the same as saying that everyone who looks at a pair of underage tits should be in jail:

The author of legal thrillers such as The Firm and A Time to Kill who has sold more than 275m books during his 25-year career, cited the case of a “good buddy from law school” who was caught up in a Canadian child porn sting operation a decade ago as an example of excessive sentencing.

“His drinking was out of control, and he went to a website. It was labelled ‘sixteen year old wannabee hookers or something like that’. And it said ’16-year-old girls’. So he went there. Downloaded some stuff – it was 16 year old girls who looked 30.

“He shouldn’t ’a done it. It was stupid, but it wasn’t 10-year-old boys. He didn’t touch anything. And God, a week later there was a knock on the door: ‘FBI!’ and it was sting set up by the Royal Canadian Mounted Police to catch people – sex offenders – and he went to prison for three years.”

If that and the haze of love and goodness at Chez Brad don’t render the intruder powerless, Brad keeps a gun in the house. He says he needs the gun to feel one hundred percent safe. He tells the Radio Timesthat he got his first gun at 6:

“There’s a rite of passage where I grew up of inheriting your ancestors’ weapons. My brother got my dad’s. I got my grandfather’s shotgun when I was kindergarten. The positive is that my father instilled in me a profound and deep respect for the weapon.”

A few Twitter account holders said Judy might care to be raped to see what it’s like. Judy’s daughter, Chloe Madeley, chimed in that her mum was right. She now gets a column in the Daily Mail to tell one and all about her ordeal:

Violated in my own home by a coward on Twitter: CHLOE MADELEY on how she faced vile threats on site following her mother’s comments

And meanwhile, a woman who was a victim of rape wonders if all the opinion trolls, vain media wannabes and has-beens making careers from her pain will ever shut up.

Dermot Turing, nephew of Alan Turing inspects the Pilot ACE computer – formerly the fastest computer in the world in the 1950s and fundamentally designed by Alan Turing, at a preview of the Codebreaker: Alan Turing’s Life and Legacy exhibition at the Science Museum.

BENEDICT Cumberbatch is plugging his film The Imitation Game. He plays Alan Turing, the mathematician and computer scientist whose key work decrypting German codes in the second world war helped the British defeat the Nazis.

Turing died in 1954. He had been convicted of gross indecency for being gay. At the time homosexuality was illegal in the UK. He endured a chemical castration as an alternative to prison. His death was suicide, so they say.

HIGHLIGHTS from Iggy Pop’s John Peel Lecture for BBC Music at the Lowry theater in Salford, Manchester.

On Apple and U2:

“The people who don’t want the free U2 download are trying to say, ‘Don’t try to force me.’ And they’ve got a point. Part of the process when you buy something from an artist, it’s kind of an anointing, you are giving people love. It’s your choice to give or withhold. You felt like they were robbed of that chance and they have a point.”

On Radiohead frontman Thom Yorke selling the album Tomorrow’s Modern Boxes via BitTorrent.

“Sure, BitTorrent is a pirate’s friend. But all pirates want to go legit, just like I wanted to be respectable. So it’s good that Thom Yorke is encouraging a positive change.”

Shown in this scene from the 1984 movie “Ghostbusters” are Bill Murray, Dan Aykroyd, center, and Harold Ramis. (AP Photo)

AS you may have heard, Ghostbusters 3 is definitely happening.

However, there’s a twist – writer and director Paul Feig says the new film will be an all-female Ghostbusters cast and he will be writing it alongside Kate Dippold (from Parks and Recreation).

Of course, some fanboiz are spitting feathers over this, as an all-female Ghostbusters isn’t what they had in mind at all. However, if the casting is right, this could be a brilliant addition to the franchise.

Feig said on Twitter: “It’s official. I’m making a new Ghostbusters & writing it with @katiedippold & yes, it will star hilarious women. That’s who I’m gonna call.”

So who could Feig cast? There’s a wealth of brilliant and funny actresses out there and everyone will have a shortlist of their own. Here are some of our favourites.

Tina Fey

Tina Fey is one of the funniest humans on the planet. Whether she’d take the Ghostbusters role is another matter, but producers should be throwing money at her.

THE BBC have made a charity single and that’s a nice thing. Of course, that doesn’t mean you can’t take the piss. The record – an all-star version of the Beach Boys’ ‘God Only Knows’ – is for Children In Need and isn’t unlike the BBC All-Star version of ‘Perfect Day’, a song about being on smack.

And so, here at Anorak, we’re doing a play-by-play of the video, looking at the deeper meaning behind the video and generally rinsing anyone involved in it.

Of course, with these grand affairs, you have to put a Marks & Spencer Christmas Advert sheen on everything, which means Victoriana and some pointless classical music bollocks.

The BBC don’t disappoint, kicking things off with a bearded conductor and an orchestra piddling about with their instruments.

Then, before you know it, the stars come rolling out thick and fast, headed up by Pharrell who, even though we’re in the throes of Autumn’s mental weather, is still showing off his aversion to socks. The lunatic.

“Sometimes in comedy, graphics are the straight man. But, in Idiocracy, we let it be absurd, as part of the experience. We realized that life in its present state already had tendencies towards the ridiculous—branding seeps in everywhere—so we let it be over the top.”

DANNY Baker tells Radio Times readers about the time he asked Harry Enfield if he had any new characters. Enfield did. He’d created Frank Doberman, who told Baker: “Oi, Baker, no! You may think you’re the heir to the late-night talk-show crown, but to me you’ll always be a loud-mouthed, talentless, balding…”

YOU pick your heroes. Former N-Dubz singer Dappy, real name Costadinos Contostavlos, poses for a photograph with a young boy after his sentencing was deferred at Reading Magistrates’ Court.

The BBC:

Dappy has had his sentencing adjourned for punching a man in a row over a woman at a nightclub. The singer attacked Devonn Reid, who told him to stop talking to his female friend and girlfriend, at Evissa in Reading on 6 October last year.

District Judge Davinder Lachhar sent the case to Guildford Crown Court for sentencing.

She said this was because Dappy was given a six-month suspended sentence at the court in 2013.

The singer, who was found guilty of the nightclub assault last month under his real name Costadinos Contostavlos, was given the suspended sentence after being convicted of affray and assault at a Guildford petrol station in 2012.

Joe Carnahan filmed one for his new film Stretch. To help us understand the process, he’s released this behind-the-scenes video of the film’s fast-forward-to scene. You will see Brooklyn Decker and Patrick Wilson getting into the loving zoone and then engaging in the full 10 seconds dry-humping coitus.

“I’ve been retired all my life,” explains Nubar Gulbenkian, now 69. “but I’ve also been working hard all my life. A fortune does not look after itself, after all.” The fortune Gulbenkian refers to is one of the largest in the world. He inherited it from his legendary father, Calouste; who was nicknamed “Mr. Five Percent” because that was his usual cut on Middle Eastern oil and who owned possibly the world’s greatest art collection. Nubar, an Armenian, was exported in a Gladstone bag from his birthplace in Turkey, a land then inhospitable to Armenians, when he was only a few weeks old. Educated in England and France, he has been married three times and would be an impressive figure, even if he lacked his father’s business acumen (which he doesn’t), for his stupendous eyebrows, well trimmed beard, monocle and a habit of inserting into his lapel every morning a fresh orchid, the color chosen to suit the occasion. He has just written an autobiography, Portrait In Oil (Simon & Schuster), in which he discusses not only his finances but his voracious appetite for preferred pleasures like foxhunting, riding, food, drink, the odes of Horace, and driving, which he took up shortly after his 65th birthday. “If something is too much of a bore to do thoroughly and with zest,” says Gulbenkian, “then don’t bother to do it at all.”

Nubar Gulbenkian, the well known oil magnate, examines a Vintage Claret during the French wine tasting reception held in the cellars of Lebegue, the well known London wine merchantsDate: 09/10/1964

When asked whether he most enjoys city life or country life, horses or Rolls-Royces, old brandy or young women, Nubar Gulbenkian reflectively strokes his luxuriant beard, puffs deeply on his cigar and makes a simple affirmation of love for the business of good living: “I prefer everything.”

Philanthropist and bon viveur, Nubar GulbenkianDate: 04/05/1961

For £250000 o.n.o, you get a long wheelbase, coach built, 4.5litre vehicle one off with snakeskin trim, electic windows, Sedanca de Ville style roof, air con. and a speedometer in the back, so allowing Gulbenkian to keep tabs on his chauffeur and ensure he drove quickly.

BBC Top Gear was filming in Argentina for one of its Funny Foreigners travelogues. Sidekicks James May and Richard Hammond were driving an old Lotus Esprit and a Mustang, but their leader, Jeremy Clarkson, the to-deadline controversy maker who likes shouting at people, was driving a Porsche 928, with a number plate referencing the Falkland Islands and 1982, the year of Britain’s war with Argentina (number plate H982 FKL).

For some mad reason people who had lost loved ones in that war thought it a tad boorish and taunting. They noticed the stunt. Top Gear mattered and was entertaining. Job done.

But some locals reacted with violence. And Clarkson was unnerved:

“I’ve been to Iraq and Afghanistan, but this was the most terrifying thing I’ve ever been involved in. There were hundreds of them. They were hurling rocks and bricks at our cars. This is not just some kind of jolly Top Gear jape – this was deadly serious.”

“I was sitting in my living room playing Skyrim, when there was a knock at my door. I wasn’t expecting anyone, so I was like, ‘Who could that be?’. I opened the door to find a guy in what looked like an old-fashioned elevator boy outfit. He did a little jig and started to sing this horrible song letting me know I’d been let go from the group.”

ONE of the big problems with feminism is that women like to spend great chunks of the debate, attacking each other. Of course, any movement needs criticism to adapt and sharpen the mind for future debates, but isn’t it a bit sad to see women trying to pull other women down, when ostensibly, their aims are the same?

And so to Annie Lennox, who said that she isn’t very impressed with Beyonce calling herself a feminist.

Kicked out! Even the great and the good are sometimes expelled from school…

Percy Bysshe Shelley

The legendary Romantic poet attended Eton College, where he refused to take part in fagging and was mercilessly bullied. Despite giving electric shocks to his tutor and blowing up a tree with gunpowder, he was not actually expelled. That came later, when he was sent down from Oxford for scandalising the place with his atheistic writings.

Albert Einstein

Nothing clever about the great man’s behaviour. Initially suspected of being ‘retarded’, he was eventually expelled for the effect his bad attitude was having on classmates.

Keith Allen

Expelled from Brentwood boarding school school at the age of 13, then sent to borstal two years later, where he ‘had a great time’.

Lily Allen

Like father, like daughter. Expelled from an impressive selection of the country’s most expensive schools, usually for drinking, smoking, and ‘doing things that I shouldn’t have been doing with boys that I shouldn’t have been doing’.

Humphrey Bogart

Expelled from the prestigious Phillips Academy, although there are differing versions of this. Reasons given include throwing the headmaster (or a groundsman) into a lake, smoking and drinking, low academic performance and insulting the staff.

Cary Grant

Expelled from Fairfield Secondary and Higher Grade School for climbing a wall into the girls’ toilets with a friend.

Salvador Dali

Expelled from the Academy of Art in Madrid for ‘disturbing the peace’ and criticising one of the professors. In his opinion none of the staff was qualified to judge his work.

Boy George

Expelled aged 15 from Eltham Green, where he truanted regularly. ‘My parents had no idea, because I used to intercept all the teachers’ letters,’ he recalled. ‘In the end they sent around 55 letters, so my mum finally found out I hadn’t been to school for seven weeks.’

Willem Dafoe

‘I was expelled from school for making a pornographic film,’ he said. ‘I was just a young boy in Wisconsin; anything to get out of there.’

Snoop Dogg

Expelled at the age of 10 from Southern Cleveland Elementary School in California, for indecent exposure.

Courtney Love

Nothing Earth-shattering: expelled for smoking and truanting.

Richard Branson

According to Branson’s own version of events, he was attending Scaitcliffe boarding school when, aged 13, he was caught sneaking out of the bedroom of the headmaster’s 18-year-old daughter: ‘The headmaster rang my dad and said to come and pick me up the next day. So I wrote this suicide note to someone I knew would open it immediately and go straight to the headmaster.’

Meanwhile he went to a nearby cliff-top, at which point the note was found, and he accepted the headmaster’s offer of a beating instead of expulsion.

Kevin Spacey

Kicked out of Northridge Military Academy for hitting a classmate on the head with a tyre.

Guy Ritchie

Expelled from Stanbridge Earls School at the age of 15. He says it was for drug use was the reason, although his father says it was for ‘cutting class and entertaining a girl in his room’.

Amy Winehouse

Famously expelled for piercing her nose… or was she? Her former headmistress, Sylvia Young, says this is a myth, although she was disruptive and did insist on wearing prohibited earrings. ‘I feel sad that Amy thought she’d been expelled,’ said Sylvia. ‘I would never have expelled her.’

Jackie Collins

The Queen of the bonkbusters was expelled, at 15, from Francis Holland School for truancy, smoking, and selling copies of her own dirty limericks.

Lewis Hamilton

When a fellow pupil at John Henry Newman School was attacked by a gang, Lewis was mistakenly identified and expelled. He was later reinstated and received an apology from the authorities.